Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Editorial
- Online Links
- Pageant-Carriage Maintenance at Chester
- Carnevale in Norwich, 1443: Gladman's Parade and its Continental Connections
- The Beccles Game Place and Local Drama in Early North-East Suffolk
- Pendens super feretrum: Fergus, Aelred, and the York ‘Funeral of the Virgin’
- George Gascoigne at Oxford
- Elizabeth Nevile's Wedding Entertainments: A Yorkshire Family Celebration in 1526 and its Contexts
- Herod's Killing of the Children in New College Chapel Oxford, 8 February 2017 (review)
- Editorial Board and Submissions
Pendens super feretrum: Fergus, Aelred, and the York ‘Funeral of the Virgin’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 July 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Editorial
- Online Links
- Pageant-Carriage Maintenance at Chester
- Carnevale in Norwich, 1443: Gladman's Parade and its Continental Connections
- The Beccles Game Place and Local Drama in Early North-East Suffolk
- Pendens super feretrum: Fergus, Aelred, and the York ‘Funeral of the Virgin’
- George Gascoigne at Oxford
- Elizabeth Nevile's Wedding Entertainments: A Yorkshire Family Celebration in 1526 and its Contexts
- Herod's Killing of the Children in New College Chapel Oxford, 8 February 2017 (review)
- Editorial Board and Submissions
Summary
In studies of the York Corpus Christi Play, the pageant sometimes known as ‘Fergus’ has proved somewhat enigmatic. Various records attesting to the pageant survive, though no script was ever entered into the York Register, and moreover both the popularity of the piece and the number of times it was actually staged have been brought into question. Perhaps the most intriguing account given of the pageant comes from 1432/3, when a complaint is recorded in the A/Y Memorandum Book concerning the apparently controversial nature of the production:
vero quia Cementarij huius ciuitatis murmurabant inter se de pagina sua in ludo corporis christi vbi ffergus fflagellatus erat pro eo quod materia pagine illius in sacra non continetur scriptura & magis risum & clamorem causabat quam deuocionem Et quandoque lites contenciones & pugne inde proueniebant in populo ipsamque paginam suam raro vel nunquam potuerunt producere & ludere clara die sicut faciunt pagine precedentes.
indeed, because the Masons of this city have become accustomed to murmur about their pageant in the Corpus Christi Play in which Fergus was beaten because the pageant's subject is not contained in sacred scripture and used to produce more laughter and noise than devotion. And whenever quarrels, disagreements, and fights used to arise among the people from this they have rarely or never been able to produce their pageant in daylight as the preceding pageants do.
This complaint offers a rare example of audience response to the York Cycle, and to the passions and conflict which these performances had the capacity to stir: we are told that this pageant led to ‘more noise and laughter than devotion’, as well as ‘quarrels, disagreements and fights’. The idea that such a boisterous response to biblical or pseudo-biblical drama occurred in this period should perhaps come as little surprise. But it is through this record of the response that we have been able to characterise the apparently unique content of this ‘lost’ play, offering tantalising details of the performance and its oddities: namely that the piece could be characterised as the pageant ‘in which Fergus was beaten’; that this beating was perhaps framed (at least in part) as the cause of this controversy; and that the subject of the pageant was not considered to be contained in ‘sacred scripture’.
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- Medieval English TheatreVolume Thirty-Nine (2017), pp. 103 - 125Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2018